Wednesday, December 14, 2016

With the release of Microsoft Outlook 2016, it is now no longer possible to manually add an Exchange account. Exchange accounts can only be added to Outlook 2016 using Autodiscover. If Autodiscover records aren't published, your administrator will need to publish them so Outlook can find the account.

In Outlook 2010 and 2013, users were able to manually add Exchange accounts to the Outlook client by selecting "Manual Setup".

Make sure you add the Autodiscover record to your public DNS or alternatively modify the hosts file with an Autodiscover record so the Outlook client can resolve the correct Exchange communication settings.

It is disappointing that you cannot select what method you wish to connect in Outlook 2016 when attempting to perform a manual setup.

Friday, December 9, 2016

I have a customer who has 3 forests all running Exchange 2003 on Windows Server 2003... yes in the year 2016 (almost 2017). Before moving to Exchange 2010 --> 2016 we are required to consolidate with some cross-forest migrations.

I need to test some things in my lab before performing this migration in production so I built some 2003 servers... been ages!

After running the installation I had issues patching the servers and I found no information online around Error Number: 0x80072EFF - surprising as it seems like such a common error (is there really no one out there installing Server 2003 now?)

When clicking start and selecting Windows Update, this is the error I received.

After playing around for a good 15 minutes googling this error, I decided to upgrade Internet Explorer to version 8 (the highest supported on 2003 server). This is downloaded from the following website for 32bit.